I saw the Frank Auerbach exhibition which is on at the Courtauld recently, The Charcoal Heads. I thought it was really brilliant. I have loved his work for a long time. I notice a lot of the artists whose work I connect with are concerned with destruction and rebuilding.
This is often true of Auerbach’s work in terms of his subject. Many of his paintings are of London in a state of disarray after World War II, when it was literally being rebuilt. His paintings are often of construction sites in apocalyptic colour schemes.
Subject aside, the form of Auerbach’s paintings foregrounds that sense of destruction and construction too. You look at his canvases heavy with thick, sculpted paint and you think of building and work. Or I do.
There is an energy that he captures which I see as the opposite of pristine restraint. His colour schemes (dark, generally) are deliberately muted and I guess you could say this is restrained but to me even this has a generative, exciting quality. The darkness of his paintings suggests an end, as I see it. But to me that darkness coupled with Auerbach’s foregrounding of work and building says: Something has ended. Now, what next?
Destruction and construction. I find his work very hopeful. To my mind it has a similar quality to Anselm Kiefer’s work, which is often sculptures or sculpted paintings of ashen wreckages. Blocks of debris, dusty wires and pipes. It always looks to me like a new start. (Both painters reference World War II in their work, both were born in Germany, although Auerbach is Jewish and his parents were murdered in The Holocaust, Kiefer is not.)
There is a work of Kiefer’s in Milan called The Seven Heavenly Palaces which I have seen many times (my boyfriend worked in Milan for a little while) which is seven towers made of lead and concrete in a dark room. You can walk around and inspect all the features of each tower. They all address different themes (I could write a lot more about this piece and maybe will do sometime). It’s a truly amazing space.
The darkness of that room, except for spotlights on each tower, is a feature I have thought about a lot. I don’t think The Seven Heavenly Palaces would function at all with different lighting. I think it would be totally ineffective. To me this work is very hopeful too, and strangely I don’t think it would be in a room which was not dark. The darkness here is a way of saying “the end” has happened I think, which is necessary for: What next?
The Charcoal Heads have a very interesting formal feature which made me think of the darkness of that room too. Auerbach made them by drawing and rubbing out over many different sessions. He would draw the sitter’s face in one session, completely rub it out at the end of the session, and then start again at the next sitting. That constant rubbing out made the canvas fall apart and so he patched it in places. You can see in each “head” sketch that there are areas on the canvas where Auerbach has plastered fresh canvas over the top, kind of how a leather sofa with patches would look.
You can’t look at the heads without noticing the patching and thinking about how the canvas has disintegrated. And this makes you think about how many versions of this head were destroyed to make the one you are looking at.
The heads that he eventually drew (or I suppose, deemed acceptable and didn’t rub out) are incredible, full of motion and life. Singular yet universal. And because you can’t look at them without thinking of the destroyed heads, you are aware that they could only be this good because of all the other versions.
The patching is, to me, a way of announcing “the end”, and of foregrounding that idea of destruction without actually making it the subject, or a subject, of the sketch. It sits in the background, in a way. In another way, is it the background? Or is it not the essence of the sketch, even more so than the ostensible subject?
The patching, after all, is totally un-ignorable because it is part of the actual fabric of the canvas. It is a much more fundamental quality of the sketch than the head sketched on top. I thought this was so smart and brilliant. I can tell I will think of this show for a long time.
Till next time xxxxx
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